Lost Highway

Lost Highway (1997) starts with a saxophonist discovering that someone has been getting into his house and filming him, and halfway through the film the protagonist becomes a different person. Every morning Fred finds a videotape at his door. They show the outside of his house, then the inside, then the bedroom. Then Fred is convicted of murdering his wife. He spends a night in the cell, and in the morning there is another man in it: a twenty four year old mechanic. The film explains nothing. Lynch described it as a psychogenic fugue: a person forgetting a truth they cannot carry and building another identity. The best scene is at a party. A man with a white face approaches Fred and says he is at his house right now, and invites him to call and check. Fred calls, and the man in front of him answers the phone. There is no effect involved; the scene works entirely through editing. Robert Blake plays that man. Years later he was tried for his own wife's murder; he was acquitted in the criminal case and found liable in the civil one. Trent Reznor supervised the music; Bowie, Rammstein and Badalamenti are on the same soundtrack. It was badly received on release and its standing has risen since. It runs 134 minutes. Good for: Lynch, nightmare logic, and formal experiment. Less good for: there is no coherent plot, and the violence and sex are harsh.